My old sparring partner Clay Shirky is at it again. Responding on the Britannica website to Nick Carr’s Atlantic piece about the decline of reading, he tells us that War and Peace and À La Recherche du Temps Perdu aren’t significant accomplishments because they are too long and dense. This is a straw man argument, of course, easily made against old-fashioned literary types who fetishize obese, inaccessible books written by over-educated Frenchmen or Russians. I wish Clay had added Joyce’s Ulysses to this list — a real fatty of an inaccessible book which, I think, epitomizes the irrelevance of supposedly “great” modern literature for the vast majority of contemporary readers.

So I’m certainly not going to publicly spank Clay for pissing on Tolstoy or Proust (my own not-so-secret fetish). But there is a more interesting critique of his analysis which gets to the fundamental problem with his argument. Clay is a historical determinist — as romantically involved with progressive narrative as any 19th-century author of long novels with happy endings. He reads history in huge optimistic gulps – just like a middle-brow romantic scarfs down a Tolstoy story. Clay believes that history gets better as it gets newer. That’s because he is all-too-confident that technology is making the world a better place. As I argued in my Prospect magazine review of his latest book, History-according-to-Clay is a forward moving locomotive, inevitably driving us toward more freedom, happiness and prosperity. Clay is a compulsive page-turner. Like so many other techno-romantics dizzy with the Whig version of history, he wants to get to the end-of-history so we can realize ourselves through our new electronic networks and toys. Thus his reading of the 15th-invention of the printing press is cartoonishly progressive:

“The printing press sacrificed the monolithic, historic, and elite culture of Europe by promoting a diverse, contemporary, and vulgar one. That upstart literature has become the new high culture, and the challenge today comes, yet again, from the broadening of participation in both consumption and production of media.”

I’m no Medievalist, but I would wager my beloved first edition copy of Ulysses that Shirky is wrong here. The idea of the Middle Ages as “monolithic”, “historic” (whatever that means) and even “elite” is the Disney version of history. One could equally well argue that pre-printing press Europe was more carnivalesque, participatory, egalitarian and irreligious. Certainly the idea that Medieval Europe was somehow less progressive or inclusive or democratic than the bureaucratized, highly religious, militaristic contemporary West is a childish delusion. Read Chaucer, read Foucault, read Weber & Nietzsche, read Marc Bloch, read John Gray, or just read conventional narrative histories of the two ages in parallel.

If, as Clay says, I’m a “know-nothing” about technology, then what sort of historian is he? The only thing worse than a know-nothing is a know-everything. Clay, I’m afraid, is a know-everything about history. That’s because he obviously hasn’t read any. The only cure for this is the consumption of history books — fat history books, thousands of pages, millions of words. History books for breakfast, history books for lunch, history books for dinner.